Cheating and RMT exploitation has hit a new level of ridiculous.

[Raoabolic]

Apparently it's litterally against thier job if a GM so much as shows up on the same map as a bot. They've told me that can get fired for it. They can't file reports to the special team on player behalf, the most they can do is give you the link.

Key word, apparently. It sounds more like the GM gave an excuse so they don't have to deal with it. Oh well, we don't pay for the botter's sub so I guess it makes sense. :^)

[Canadane]

Apparently it's litterally against thier job if a GM so much as shows up on the same map as a bot. They've told me that can get fired for it. They can't file reports to the special team on player behalf, the most they can do is give you the link.

And then you have to type in the names that are intentionally hard to copy or read from an image. Or you know there's bots because monsters are dying but there's no visable player.

GMs can observe maps without physically having their character there.

[KageTokage]

GMs can observe maps without physically having their character there.

I don't know how XIV works, but I know in some other games the bots could detect the GMs even when they're "stealthed" and would stop moving or even forcibly DC themselves when they approached.

Sad thing is it actually worked as a deterrent because they couldn't punish someone if they couldn't observe them for evidence.

[Kleeya]

Expectations : "just allow the gms to ban bots and the problem will be solved ! I really dont understand why we can't get rid of a problem which has plagued the mmos for decades when my one liner solution is so simple and so effective !"

Reality : since the current gm team is already doing something else and don't have the time for that, you would need to hire new gms to ban bots. Since there is a never-ending supply of so many bots 24/24 on every server, you would need a bare minimum of 3 new gms per server, working 8h per day one after another to cover the 24h there is in a day. Since there is 73 servers, you are talking of hiring 73x3 = 219 new gms, which might not even suffice because while they are banning bots on the Moon, they can not be at the same time in all the other maps to ban all the newly automatically created other bots, which means that the players here would still be complaining seeing bots and that the gms are doing nothing against them.

Now remember that we already have some parts of the game being scrapped because there is not enough money, and answer this question : what are you ready to give up in exhange of the hiring of several hundreds of gms ? Having even less ultimate raids ? Less dungeons ? Less job balance ?

All that for the hiring of all the new gms to become useless when, in less than a few days, the bots will start to be programmed to show some random patterns to make them human-like. In fact it wouldn't even surprise me if that already weren't the case for some of them, and that the ones flying always in the same straight line, or never deconnecting instead of giving the lead to some other character every X hours, are only the badly programmed one.

[KageTokage]

I struggle to believe that the GMs are so constantly overloaded with harassment reports that they'd have no time to address the bot problems to any extent if it was placed under their jurisdiction like...virtually every other MMO on the market. It's not like these guys can come back instantly when they have to relevel FSH to 90 and do the MSQ whenever they want to get a new bot going. Realistically, I think they'd just need a few people per DC dedicated to following up on reports if they wanted to keep them in check, not the exaggerated figure you mentionedl; moreso because individual bots can often be linked to part of a bigger collective that can be purged in one fell swoop.

I've also already seen some "advanced" bots that try to behave in a more random manner but they're still not even remotely convincing. There are certain janky elements to how they path around zones (Like how they take flight) that I really think they would've axed by now if they were actually capable of it given the other silly things they do to try to seem more human such as using the node detecting skills.

[Deceptus]

The bot programmers then set up their new accounts, figure out what the counter measure was and find a new way around it. What's achieved through code can be circumvented by other code..

The bot countermeasures are simply

Set up a new email and a new account
Set up a new payment method
Run leveling script to desired level
Continue botting as normal

Can you imagine how much things would cost if everyone had to gather their own crystals and aethersand, instead of bots constantly minting them by the thousands?

IMHO Crystals should have went away a long time ago as they're nothing more than bot farms at this point.

[KageTokage]

Well, I've been monitoring the moon via player search and while the whole lot of them are still there, I noticed they have a rather curious practice of playing musical chairs and periodically swapping between servers with little rhyme or reason.

I can't help but wonder if it's meant to be some kind of countermeasure to obfuscate their activities from the STF.

[KageTokage]

It's now been over a week since I first reported these guys and they're still at it, so I'm officially in the "doubt they're ever going to do anything" mentality because even if the botting went under the radar as it usually does, the hacking should not.

I feel keeping this alive as a general "What the heck is the STF doing" thread would be prudent considering that the revamped PvP has brought in a new surge of cheaters, though.

[Faafetai]

I know this is serious and I try to do my part with the bots I find as well as the rmt and phishing attempts constantly. Your post read in my mind as a natural geographic discover channel type of documentary and I had a bit of a laugh at first because it is crazy this actually does happen. 'This operation must be taken down' vibe and operation of this scale. I know this is horrible, but they fact that this exists and the wording. I don't know why I find this so hilarious. I think its because of my very dry humor, but I love this post. I will try to help if I can and see if there are any on Primal when I get there because no way they would just be on one datacenter. It may also be possible to see if a bot selling resources on the market could be caught running similar multiple automated bots within the world at the node they are collecting resources from. They may be in the floor possibly but the idle cam usually can pick them up alot of the times. Though thank you for making me laugh at the same time as bring this to everyone's attention.

Although that is true, the problem is that botting is out of hand and SE is not willing to hire more GMs to investigate those issues. Every cheating report that I wrote has been entirely ignored by GMs without even bothering to reply and let me know that they are at least investigating.

There was maybe one time I got a response and they gave me information about a special task force but I need to actually find out how to contact the special task force and if they are on the forums or through some other means. At least the fisherman are staying still the 50 lala bots kept teleporting away so when I seen this event I tried to get as many of their names but this is usually really hard with how fast they go through the floors. I am also always unsure if I should report these bots as rmt when their program breaks and they start typing 0000 in the chat because they are failing to click an npc.

[SiSenor]

I decided to take a look around on my Data Center (Primal) and it seems to be the same. Between 3-6 wanderers on each server, all of them third class privates on a GC, with usually only one combat class at 87-90 and fishing at 90. All of them were using HQ ilvl 560 gear and no glams. They were also not in a FC.